


Antidote

by Garonne



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 12:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4877434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/pseuds/Garonne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Illya's been poisoned, and Napoleon has to rely on his high-school chemistry knowledge to come up with the antidote. And the clock is ticking...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antidote

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Beta Challenge on the LJ comm MFUWSS. Many thanks to the members of the comm, particularly elmey, akane42me and laurose8, for all the advice and encouragement.

.. .. ..

Napoleon stared at the daunting array of glassware and chemical jars scattered across the workbench. By the dim light in the underground laboratory, he could see most of the jars bore ominous skull-and-crossbones or fire hazard labels.

Then he looked down at Illya, who was lying on a low bench in the corner of the room, his eyes closed. The fight with the guards had given him a broken leg and sprained wrist. They would heal. They weren't what Napoleon was worried about.

"Are you sure you know exactly which compound he injected you with, Illya?"

"Ninety-nine percent sure." Illya's voice was faint. Was that the effect of the poison?

"And are you sure you remember the formula for the antidote?"

Illya had only gotten a short look at those papers before they ended up in the fire. Surely he couldn't remember the details?

Illya opened his eyes and raised his head to frown at Napoleon.

"What I'm sure of is that the longer you wait, the less effective the antidote will be," he said, managing to inject a familiar crisp impatience into his voice, despite its weakness.

Napoleon frowned. He looked again at the rows upon rows of jars and bottles he would have to use -- and what he made could just as easily turn out to be another poison as to be the antidote.

And to think that a mere ten minutes ago, everything had seemed to be going so well. Napoleon had scaled the mountainside, found Illya, and freed him from his cell. The enemy had been neutralised, and they'd called for a clean-up team. That was when Illya had sprung this little matter on him.

The poison supposedly needed five hours to take effect, and Illya had been injected more than three hours ago. It wouldn't have been such a problem if they weren't in a crazy megalomaniac's mountain hideaway in the middle of nowhere.

Napoleon picked up the glass beaker into which Illya had already weighed a small pile of a mysterious yellow powder. That was as far as he'd gotten on the preparation of the antidote, before he'd keeled over and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor. Now, he was lying down on the bench with Napoleon's coat under his head for a pillow, directing Napoleon's operations.

"You should have a weighing scales and a jar of potassium chloride -- that's KCl. Weigh out ten grams. And make sure the spatula is clean first. I don't want to end up ingesting some unknown additional poison."

By spatula Napoleon supposed he meant the flat metal thing with a kink in the end. 

Well, this first step sounded easy. He picked up the jar.

"Ah, ah, ah!" Illya sounded like a schoolmaster who'd caught one of his pupils on the brink of a very foolish error.

"What?"

"Safety glasses."

Napoleon shot a glance down at Illya, but he still had his eyes closed. Napoleon sighed, and looked around. A pair of enormous safety glasses lay on the end of the workbench, and he put them on, feeling a little foolish.

"Is something going to explode in my face?"

"Not unless you make a mistake."

Napoleon took a deep breath.

"Right, ten grams," he muttered to himself.

"Surely the American high school curriculum contains a modicum of instruction in the chemical sciences?"

Illya sounded amused, which heartened Napoleon very much. Better Illya laughing at him than Illya racked with pain.

"Well, ah, when I discovered you couldn't really make gold, I'm afraid I lost interest in chemistry at school."

"You can, actually, but that's the purview of nuclear physics, not of chemistry," Illya said. "Have you measured ten grams?"

"Yes."

"Now add seven milliliters from the bottle marked acetic anhydride. Make sure the measuring cylinder is clean first too, thank you." 

"I know, I know," Napoleon muttered.

Illya took him through a few more complex and nerve-wracking steps, until Napoleon ended up with a round-bottomed flask filled with a clear liquid and suspended over a flame, heating gently.

"Now what?"

"Now we wait for twenty minutes."

"Oh."

Napoleon came to sit on the bench by Illya's feet, careful of his injured leg.

"Maybe the clean-up and medical team will get here before you actually have to take my potion," he suggested.

"Maybe."

They both fell silent.

"Did you want to be a chemist when you were younger?" Napoleon asked after a few minutes.

"No, a physicist. I was one for a while too, you know."

"Wishing now that you still were?"

He couldn't help thinking that in that case, Illya wouldn't be lying here being slowly poisoned -- though he hated to think they'd never have met.

"Don't be ridiculous, Napoleon."

Illya's voice was so very certain that Napoleon had to smile. 

"You really wanted to be a physicist? Ever since the age of five?"

"You didn't specify an age in your question," Illya pointed out. After a moment's pause, he admitted, "No, until I was ten I wanted to be a train driver."

Napoleon grinned. He was picturing a tiny Illya, standing right at the end of a railway platform and craning his neck to watch the train driver at work.

"Train driver, eh? That one's a classic." 

"You did too?"

"There weren't any train lines where I grew up, but I did want to be a truck driver." Speaking of trains, he was reminded of a particular hair-raising mission in the Italian alps, and a rickety old funicular railway. "You have driven a few trains in the line of duty, haven't you?"

A tiny smile twitched at Illya's lips.

"Yes, but helicopters turned out to be rather more fun."

Napoleon glanced at his watch again. Ten more minutes to go.

"Did you ever want to be a spy?" Illya asked.

"I did go through a period of wanting to be Dick Tracy. You know, the comic strip detective. But not a spy, no. Did you?"

"No. Spy, _shpion_... that was a word I associated with KGB informants, and people disappearing in the middle of the night."

"And yet here we are."

"Yes."

They fell silent again.

Napoleon shot a nervous glance at the clear liquid, still bubbling away above the flame. If he had messed up earlier in the process, he could probably have thrown out the mixture and started over from scratch. But if he made a mistake now, it would be too late to begin again.

He cleared his throat.

"You know, I've often been complimented on my homemade lasagna."

"Please don't treat this the way you would cooking," Illya said sharply. After a moment's pause, he added in a different tone, "Besides, if you'd ever tasted _my_ homemade lasagna, you'd know there's absolutely no correlation between cooking and chemistry skills."

At that, Napoleon just had to burst out laughing. Illya joined in, and they grinned at each other, cutting through the tension in the room.

Napoleon looked at his watch again.

"Twenty minutes," he announced.

"Is it blue?"

Napoleon got to his feet and took a closer look at the flask.

"A sort of greyish blue."

"All right. Now find the bottle marked bromicyllin."

Illya took him through a few more steps in the synthesis, slowly and carefully. The final step was to filter the clear blue liquid Napoleon now had through a cone of paper and into another flask, which Illya told him to mount above the flame again.

"And now we wait."

"Another twenty minutes?"

"Only a quarter of an hour."

They waited in silence this time. Napoleon's guts were taut with worry. Normally, under mission conditions, he prided himself on his nerves of steel, but this was rather different. This was painfully slow, and there was no enemy here, no one in the room but the two of them, and the beaker. 

"There's a lot of waiting involved in this chemistry business," he said abruptly.

"Yes..."

Illya's voice was so faint as to be almost inaudible.

"I'm sorry, I should let you rest."

"No, I'd rather... talk."

Now, of course, Napoleon couldn't think of anything to say.

"Sure you want to take this?" he asked.

Illya opened his eyes, and made a visible effort to raise his voice.

"I most certainly don't want to, no, but I will."

Napoleon winced. He felt a gloomy resignation settle over him. And to think he was supposed to be the optimist.

After a minute, he felt a poke at his elbow.

"If this goes wrong, Napoleon, remember it could just as easily have been me as you who messed up."

That would be cold comfort. But Illya's hand on his arm was warm, and Napoleon knew what he meant. It would be fine. It had to be fine.

Illya's eyes had drifted shut again. Napoleon sat in silence, his mind engaged in the fruitless exercise of trying to think where in this busy day they could have turned right instead of left, and avoided this situation entirely.

Suddenly, Illya jerked awake, struggling to sit up.

"Napoleon, I can't hear the flame any more."

Napoleon sprang to his feet, and saw immediately that the flame below the beaker had gone out. His blood ran cold. Had the gas supply been cut off? Damaged in their attack on the laboratory, perhaps?

His gaze followed the gas pipeline along the wall. The pressure on the gauge near the entrypoint into the room seemed fine, but the pressure at the workbench had dropped to zero.

"I think it's a blockage. Or a leak."

Would it be quicker to get the gas going again, or try to keep a steady flame burning under the beaker with matches and scrap paper?

He took a gamble on trying a repair, and it paid off. Within two minutes he had identified and tightened a loose joint in the gas pipe. By that time, however, the flame had been out for several minutes, and the antidote solution was cooling down.

He shot a worried glance at Illya.

"Will that make a difference?"

"I'm not sure," Illya said thoughtfully. "Give it another five minutes' heat, please."

Sooner than Napoleon would have liked, the time was up. It was almost four hours now since Illya had been poisoned, and the chances of the medical team arriving in time seemed to have dwindled to zero.

"All right, switch off the gas, and let the beaker cool down a little."

"And then?"

"And then I'm going to drink it."

Napoleon got to his feet and switched off the gas. Once the beaker had stopped bubbling and steaming, he brought it down to Illya's level and helped him to sit up.

"This is nerve-wracking," Napoleon confessed. "And to think I used to dread my chemistry tests at school."

To his surprise, Illya smiled.

"Oh, no, I'd say it's almost routine, actually. I put my life in your hands all the time, Napoleon. I'm quite used to it."

He met Napoleon's gaze, and Napoleon returned the smile. Then he took a deep breath, and handed over the beaker.

"Will we know straight away?"

"Well, we'll know we haven't brewed a poison by mistake. As to whether it will work as an antidote -- " Illya looked down into the blue liquid, swirling it around. "Well, when have either of us ever failed? It will work."

He raised the beaker in a mock salute to Napoleon, and then drained it dry.


End file.
